Word: clouzot
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...metaphor for existence-"As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport." With this image, with the back of his hand for any sense of purpose or significance in human life and in the world around it, Director Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Raven, Jenny Lamour) introduces a picture that is surely one of the most evil ever made, and yet, curiously, one that uses the approaches of religion. The Wages of Fear seeks out its epiphanies at the cold-blood level of the swamp, where the winding python rears to hiss...
...four roaches are men, four derelicts on the rot in a Central American oil town. Mario (Yves Montand), a young Corsican with meaty good looks and the gross itch they often portend, ekes out his boredom by cadging bliss at a local refreshment booth (Vera Clouzot). Jo (Charles Vanel), a career thug who fears nothing he can get his hairy hands on and thinks he can get them on everything, hops spiderishly from plot to pointless plot. Luigi (Folco Lulli) is a big warm country boy from Italy, so stupid (as Mario sees him) that he works for a living...
...truck. From that moment forward, the moviegoer is in physical danger from this picture, and should be warned of the fact. Whatever else may be said of it, Wages of Fear is one of the great shockers of all time. The suspense it generates is close to prostrating. Clouzot is not interested in tingling the customer's spine, but rather in giving him the symptoms of a paralytic stroke-a reaction he plainly considers no more than adequate to the condition of human society in the 20th century...
Suspense is, moreover, by no means the only cinematic technique Clouzot can superbly control. He uses his camera with a malevolent dexterity; everything it lights upon, it stings. He cuts from scene to scene by savage slashes and mocking juxtapositions. His frames are cold and harsh, and within them beauty ripples luridly, almost too luridly...
Better & Better. While Hollywood was struggling to bring forth a new era, most European moviemakers were apparently killing time in the waiting room. Some of the best foreign pictures-Henri-George Clouzot's Le Salaire de la Peur and Vittorio de Sica's Umberto D-were not shown in the U.S., because exhibitors thought they would not make enough money. Even so, the continental-import trade was a little shoddy. The British did somewhat better. They produced a top-notch musical (The Beggar's Opera), a funny farce (The Captain's Paradise), a first-rate...